Part 4-Basic SEO Strategy-Keyword Analysis

Basic SEO- Keywords

Keywords or keyword phrases is the place that every company should start with when developing their marketing strategy. They are the essence that describes your company because they are what the customers are searching for. Selecting keywords is essential to building branding, graphics, and especially essential to building a search campaign. If you cannot describe your company in five keywords or phrases then you will not be able to communicate the core values to your website visitors.

We use the term keywords as though we are discussing a single word but we are really usually talking about Long-tailed

keywords or keyword phrases. Do a brain storming session on describing your company and think about phrases that you would write on your site and in your social communication.

Don’t overthink it, just focus on how a consumer would use various words to find what you have to offer. If you sell exercise equipment, then focus on the term as they would read in sentences because separating Exercise from the word Equipment would get you a completely different search result and neither one may satisfy the need. Find out how often times searchers look for “Exercise equipment for runners” if that fits your products.

Use words and phrases that are “closer to the sell” which means a term like SEO or search engine optimization may be a research or learning term but “Cincinnati SEO firm” may be a term that is closer to the conversion point. “Silver jewelry in Birmingham” is much closer to the conversion point than just “Jewelry”. I have fought hard for those lone word terms but in almost every case have found that the more specific keywords and phrases bring a better SEM investment for SEO and PPC marketing.

When writing content, be careful not to fall into the old “keyword stuffing” approach to writing. Write to benefit your reader and give them current, relevant information about your product, service, and industry. When those keyword phrases flow into your writing then go with it but don’t write to stuff. If you keep your keyword phrases before you as you write then they will find themselves used when appropriate and not forced. Remember that the genius of Google and the modern search engines is a relevant search so give that to them on your website and social writing. Give them what they want (relevancy) and they will give you what you want (Conversions). It begins with the right keywords and keyword phrases.

Digging for the gold:

A few tools that will helppicking SEO keywords:

Google Keyword Tool is a great tool but watch the tutorials so you can get everything that you need out of it.

Long Tail Pro has a free trial where you can explore finding hundreds of keywords

Wordtrackeris a paid but widely used keyword and competitive intelligence tool.

Chuck Caine is founder of Joint Effort Marketing Group, A Cincinnati SEO Marketing firm and has over 30 years of marketing experience.

By Chuck|2016-03-31T01:13:15+00:00January 25th, 2016|Cincinnati SEO|Comments Off on Part 4-Basic SEO Strategy-Keyword Analysis